9. Adoration

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_ IX. ADORATION

Silvius, in _As You Like It_, says that love is "all adoration," and in _Twelfth Night_, when Olivia asks: "How does he love me?" Viola answers: "With adorations." Romeo asks: "What shall I swear by?" and Juliet replies:

Do not swear at all;
Or, if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self,
Which is the god of my idolatry,
And I'll believe thee.

 

DEIFICATION OF PERSONS

Thus Shakspere knew that love is, as Emerson defined it, the "deification of persons," and that women adore as well as men. Helena, in _All's Well that Ends Well_, says of her love for Bertram:

Thus, Indian-like
Religious in mine error, I adore
The sun that looks upon his worshipper,
But knows of him no more.

"Shakspere shared with Goethe, Petrarch, Raphael, Dante, Rousseau, Jean Paul, ... a mystical veneration for the feminine element of humanity as the higher and more divine." (Dowden, III.) Within the last few centuries, adoration of femininity has become a sort of instinct in men, reaching its climax in romantic love. The modern lover is like a sculptor who takes an ordinary block of marble and carves a goddess out of it. His belief that his idol is a living goddess is, of course, an illusion, but the _feeling_ is real, however fantastic and romantic it may seem. He is so thoroughly convinced of the incomparable superiority of his chosen divinity that "it is marvellous to him that all the world does not want her too, and he is in a panic when he thinks of it," as Charles Dudley Warner puts it. Ouida speaks of "the graceful hypocrisies of courtship," and no doubt there are many such; but in romantic love there is no hypocrisy; its devotion and adoration are absolutely sincere.

The romantic lover adores not only the girl herself but everything associated with her. This phase of love is poetically delineated in Goethe's _Werther_:

"To-day," Werther writes to his friend, "I could not go to see Lotta, being unavoidably detained by company. What was there to do? I sent my valet to her, merely in order to have someone about me who had been near her. With what impatience I expected him, with what joy I saw him return! I should have liked to seize him by the hand and kiss him, had I not been ashamed.

"There is a legend of a Bononian stone which being placed in the sun absorbs his rays and emits them at night. In such a light I saw that valet. The knowledge that her eyes had rested on his face, his cheeks, the buttons and the collar of his coat, made all these things valuable, sacred, in my eyes. At that moment I would not have exchanged that fellow for a thousand dollars, so happy was I in his presence. God forbid that you should laugh at this. William, are these things phantasms if they make us happy?"

Fielding wrote a poem on a half-penny which a young lady had given to a beggar, and which the poet redeemed for a half-crown. Sir Richard Steele wrote to Miss Scurlock:

"You must give me either a fan, a mask, or a glove you have worn, or I cannot live; otherwise you must expect that I'll kiss your hand, or, when I next sit by you, steal your handkerchief."

Modern literature is full of such evidences of veneration for the fair sex. The lover worships the very ground she trod on, and is enraptured at the thought of breathing the same atmosphere that surrounded her. To express his adoration he thinks and talks, as we have seen, in perpetual hyperbole:

It's a year almost that I have not seen her;
Oh! last summer green things were greener,
Brambles fewer, the blue sky bluer.

---C.G. Rossetti.

 

PRIMITIVE CONTEMPT FOR WOMEN

The adoration of women, individually or collectively, is, however, an entirely modern phenomenon, and is even now very far from being universal. As Professor Chamberlain has pointed out (345): "Among ourselves woman-worship nourishes among the well-to-do, but is almost, if not entirely, absent among the peasantry." Still less would we expect to find it among the lower races. Primitive times were warlike times, during which warriors were more important than wives, sons more useful than daughters. Sons also were needed for ancestor worship, which was believed to be essential for bliss in a future life. For these reasons, and because women were weaker and the victims of natural physical disadvantages, they were despised as vastly inferior to men, and while a son was welcomed with joy, the birth of a daughter was bewailed as a calamity, and in many countries she was lucky--or rather unlucky--if she was allowed to live at all.

A whole volume of the size of this one might be made up of extracts from the works of explorers and missionaries describing the contempt for women--frequently coupled with maltreatment--exhibited by the lower races in all parts of the world. But as the attitude of Africans, Australians, Polynesians, Americans, and others, is to be fully described in future chapters, we can limit ourselves here to a few sample cases taken at random.[25] Jacques and Storm relate (Floss, II., 423) how one day in a Central African village, the rumor spread that a goat had been carried off by a crocodile. Everybody ran to and fro in great excitement until it was ascertained that the victim was only a woman, whereupon quiet was restored. If an Indian refuses to quarrel with a squaw or beat her, this is due, as Charlevoix explains (VI., 44), to the fact that he would consider that as unworthy of a warrior, as she is too far beneath him. In Tahiti the head of a husband or father was sacred from a woman's touch. Offerings to the gods would have been polluted if touched by a woman. In Siam the wife had to sleep on a lower pillow than her husband's, to remind her of her inferiority. No woman was allowed to enter the house of a Maori chief. Among the Samoyedes and Ostyaks a wife was not allowed in any corner of the tent except her own; after pitching the tent she was obliged to fumigate it before the men would enter. The Zulus regard their women "with haughty contempt." Among Mohammedans a woman has a definite value only in so far as she is related to a husband; unmarried she will always be despised, and heaven has no room for her. (Ploss, II., 577-78.) In India the blessing bestowed on girls by elders and priests is the insulting

"Mayst thou have eight sons, and may thy husband survive thee." "On every occasion the poor girl is made to feel that she is an unwelcome guest in the family." (Ramabai Saravasti, 13.)

[FOOTNOTE 25: A multitude of others may be found in an interesting article on "Sexual Taboo" by Crawley in the _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxvi.]

William Jameson Reid, who visited some of the unexplored regions of Northeastern Thibet gives a graphic description of the hardness and misery of woman's lot among the Pa-Urgs:

"Although, owing to the scarcity, a woman is a valuable commodity, she is treated with the utmost contempt, and her existence is infinitely worse than the very animals of her lord and master. Polyandry is generally practised, increasing the horror of her position, for she is required to be a slave to a number of masters, who treat her with the most rigorous harshness and brutality. From the day of her birth until her death (few Pa-Urg women live to be fifty) her life is one protracted period of degradation. She is called upon to perform the most menial and degrading of services and the entire manual labor of the community, it being considered base of a male to engage in other labor than that of warfare and the chase....

"When a child is to be born the mother is driven from the village in which she lives, and is compelled to take up her abode in some roadside hut or cave in the open country, a scanty supply of food, furnished by her husbands, being brought to her by the other women of the tribe. When the child is born the mother remains with it for one or two months, and then leaving it in a cave, returns to the village and informs her eldest husband of its birth and the place where she has left it. If the child is a male, some consideration is shown to her; should it be a female, however, her lot is frightful, for aside from the severe beating to which she is subjected by her husband, she suffers the scorn and contumely of the rest of the tribe. If a male child, the husband goes to the cave and brings it back to the village; if it is of the opposite sex he is left to his own volition; sometimes he returns with the female infant; as often he ignores it entirely and allows it to perish, or may dispose of it to some other man as a prospective wife."[26]

[FOOTNOTE 26: New York _Evening Post_, January 21, 1899.]

In Corea women are so little esteemed that they do not even receive separate names, and a husband considers it an act of condescension to speak to his wife. When a young man of the ruling classes marries, he spends three or four days with his bride, then returns to his concubine, "in order to prove that he does not care much for the bride." (Ploss, II., 434.) "The condition of Chinese women is most pitiable," writes the Abbe Hue:

"Suffering, privation, contempt, all kinds of misery
and degradation, seize on her in the cradle, and
accompany her to the tomb. Her birth is commonly
regarded as a humiliation and a disgrace to the
family--an evident sign of the malediction of heaven.
If she be not immediately suffocated, a girl is
regarded and treated as a creature radically
despicable, and scarcely belonging to the human race."

He adds that if a bridegroom dies, the most honorable course for the bride is to commit suicide. Even the Japanese, so highly civilized in some respects, look down on women with unfeigned contempt, likening themselves to heaven and the women to earth. There are ten stations on the way up the sacred mount Fuji. Formerly no woman was allowed to climb above the eighth. Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, of the University of Tokyo, has a foot-note in his _Things Japanese_ (274) in which he relates that in the introduction to his translation of the _Kojiki_ he had drawn attention to the inferior place held by women in ancient as in modern Japan. Some years afterward six of the chief literati of the old school translated this introduction into Japanese. They patted the author on the head for many things, but when they reached the observation anent the subjection of women, their wrath exploded:

"The subordination of women to men," so ran their
commentary, "is an extremely correct custom. To think
the contrary is to harbor European prejudice.... For
the man to take precedence over the woman is the grand
law of heaven and earth. To ignore this, and to talk of
the contrary as barbarous, is absurd."

The way in which these kind, gentle, and pretty women are treated by the men, Chamberlain says on another page,

"has hitherto been such as might cause a pang to any
generous European heart.... At the present moment the
greatest duchess or marchioness in the land is still
her husband's drudge. She fetches and carries for him,
bows down humbly in the hall when my lord sallies forth
on his walks abroad, waits upon him at meals, may be
divorced at his good pleasure."

This testimony regarding a nation which in some things--especially aesthetic culture and general courteousness--surpasses Europe and America, is of special value, as it shows that love, based on sympathy with women's joys and sorrows, and adoration of their peculiar qualities, is everywhere the last flower of civilization, and not, as the sentimentalists claim, the first. If even the advanced Japanese are unable to feel romantic love--for you cannot adore what you egotistically look down on--it is absurd to look for it among barbarians and savages, such as the Fuegians, who, in times of necessity, eat their old women, or the Australians, among whom not many women are allowed to die a natural death, "they being generally despatched ere they become old and emaciated, that so much good food may not be lost."[27]

[FOOTNOTE 27: Fitzroy, II., 183; _Trans. Ethn. Soc_., New Series, III., 248-88.]

There are some apparent exceptions to the universal contempt for females even among cannibals. Thus it is known that the Peruvian Casibos never eat women. It is natural to jump to the conclusion that this is due to respect for the female sex. It is, however, as Tschudi shows, assignable to exactly the opposite feeling:

"All the South American Indians, who still remain under
the influence of sorcery and empiricism, consider women
in the light of impure and evil beings, and calculated
to injure them. Among a few of the less rude nations
this aversion is apparent in domestic life, in a
certain unconquerable contempt of females. With the
anthropophagi the feeling extends, fortunately, to
their flesh, which is held to be poisonous."

The Caribs had a different reason for making it unlawful to eat women. "Those who were captured," says P. Martyr, "were kept for breeding, as we keep fowl, etc," Sir Samuel Baker relates (_A.N._, 240), that among the Latookas it was considered a disgrace to kill a woman--not, however, because of any respect felt for the sex, but because of the scarcity and money value of women.

 

HOMAGES TO PRIESTESSES

Equally deceptive are all other apparent exceptions to the customary contempt for women. While the women of Fiji, Tonga, and other islands of the Pacific were excluded from all religious worship, and Papuan females were not even allowed to approach a temple, it is not uncommon among the inferior races for women to be priestesses. Bosnian relates that on the African Slave Coast the women who served as priestesses enjoyed absolute sway over their husbands, who were in the habit of serving them on their knees. This, however, was contrary to the general rule, wherefore it is obvious that the homage was not to the woman as such, but to the priestess. The feeling inspired in such cases is, moreover, fear rather than respect; the priestess among savages is a sorceress, usually an old woman whose charms have faded, and who has no other way of asserting herself than by assuming a pretence to supernatural powers and making herself feared as a sorceress. Hysterical persons are believed by savages to be possessed of spirits, and as women are specially liable to hysteria and to hallucinations, it was natural that they should be held eligible for priestly duties. Consequently, if there was any respect involved here at all, it was for an infirmity, not for a virtue--a result of superstition, not of appreciation or admiration of special feminine qualities.[28]

[FOOTNOTE 28: That moral infirmities, too, were capable of winning the respect of savages, may be seen in Carver's _Travels in North America_.]

 

KINSHIP THROUGH FEMALES ONLY

Dire confusion regarding woman's status has been created in many minds by three distinct ethnologic phenomena, which are, moreover, often confounded: (1) kinship and heredity through females; (2) matriarchy, or woman's rule in the family (domestic); (3) gynaicocracy, or woman's rule in the tribe (political).

(1) It is a remarkable fact that among many tribes, especially in Australia, America, and Africa, children are named after their mother, while rank and property, too, are often inherited in the female line of descent. Lafitau observed this custom among American Indians more than a century ago, and in 1861 a Swiss jurist, Bachofen, published a book in which he tried to prove, with reference to this "kinship through mothers only," that it indicated that there was a time when women everywhere ruled over men. A study of ethnologic data shows, however, that this inference is absolutely unwarranted by the facts. In Australia, for instance, where children are most commonly named after their mother's clan, there is no trace of woman's rule over man, either in the present or the past. The man treats the woman as a master treats his slaves, and is complete master of her children. Cunow, an authority on Australian relationships, remarks:

"Nothing could be more perverse than to infer from the
custom of reasoning kinship through females, that woman
rules there, and that a father is not master of his
children. On the contrary, the father regards himself
everywhere, even in tribes with a female line of
descent, as the real procreator. He is considered to be
the one who plants the germ and the woman as merely the
soil in which it grows. And as the wife belongs to him,
so does the child that comes from her womb. Therefore
he claims also those children of his wife concerning
whom he knows or assumes that he did not beget them;
for they grew on his soil."

Similarly with the American Indians. Grosse has devoted several pages (73-80) to show that with the tribes among which kinship through females prevails woman's position is not in the least better than with the others. Everywhere woman is bought, obliged to submit to polygamy, compelled to do the hardest and least honorable work, and often treated worse than a dog. The same is true of the African tribes among whom kinship in the female line prevails.

If, therefore, kinship through mothers does not argue female supremacy, how did that kinship arise? Le Jeune offered a plausible explanation as long ago as 1632. In the _Jesuit Relations_ (VI., 255), after describing the immorality of the Indians, he goes on to say:

"As these people are well aware of this corruption,
they prefer to take the children of their sisters as
heirs, rather than their own, or than those of their
brothers, calling in question the fidelity of their
wives, and being unable to doubt that these nephews
come from their own blood. Also among the Hurons--who
are more licentious than our Montagnais, because they
are better fed--it is not the child of a captain but
his sister's son, who succeeds the father."

The same explanation has been advanced by other writers and by the natives of other countries where kinship through females prevails;[29] and it doubtless holds true in many cases.

[FOOTNOTE 29: Garcia _Origin de los Indios de el Nuevo Mondo_; McLennan; Ingham (Westermarck, 113) concerning the Bakongo; Giraud-Teulon, 208, 209, concerning Nubians and other Ethiopians.]

In others the custom of naming children after their mothers is probably simply a result of the fact that a child is always more closely associated with the mother than with the father. She brings it into the world, suckles it, and watches over it; in the primitive times, even if promiscuity was not prevalent, marriages were of short duration and divorces frequent, wherefore the male parentage would be so constantly in doubt that the only feasible thing was to name the children after their mothers. For our purposes, fortunately, this knotty problem of the origin of kinship through females, which has given sociologists so much trouble,[30] does not need to be solved. We are concerned solely with the question, "Does kinship in the female line indicate the supremacy of women, or their respectful treatment?" and that question, as we have seen, must be answered with a most emphatic No. There is not a single fact to bear out the theory that man's rule was ever preceded by a period when woman ruled. The lower we descend, the more absolute and cruelly selfish do we find man's rule over woman. The stronger sex everywhere reduces the weaker to practical slavery and holds it in contempt. Primitive woman has not yet developed these qualities in which her peculiar strength lies, and if she had, the men would be too coarse to appreciate them.

[FOOTNOTE 30: See Letourneau, 332-400; Westermarck, 39-41, 96-113; Grosse, 11-12,50-63, 75-78, 101-163, 107, 180.]

 

WOMAN'S DOMESTIC RULE

(2) As we ascend in the scale we find a few cases where women rule or at least share the rule with the men; but these occur not among savages but with the lower and higher barbarians, and at the same time they are, as Grosse remarks, "among the scarcest curiosities of ethnology." The Garos of Assam have women at the head of their clans. Dyak women are consulted in political matters and have equal rights with the men. Macassar women in Celebes also are consulted as regards public affairs, and frequently ascend the throne. A few similar cases have been noted in Africa, where, _e.g._, the princesses of the Ashantees domineer over their husbands; but these apply only to the ruling class, and do not concern the sex as a whole. Some strange tales of masculine submission in Nicaragua are told by Herrera. But the best-known instance is that of the Iroquois and Hurons. Their women, as Lafitau relates (I., 71), owned the land, and the crops, they decided upon peace or war, took charge of slaves, and made marriages. The Huron Wyandots had a political council consisting of four women. The Iroquois Seneca women could chase lazy husbands from the premises, and could even depose a chief. Yet these cases are not conclusive as to the real status of the women in the tribe. The facts cited are, as John Fiske remarks (_Disc. Amer_., I., 68), "not incompatible with the subjection of women to extreme drudgery and ill-treatment." Charlevoix, one of the eye-witnesses to these exceptional privileges granted to some Indian women, declares expressly that their domination was illusory; that they were, at home, the slaves of their husbands; that the men despised them thoroughly, and that the epithet "woman" was an insult.[31] And Morgan, who made such a thorough study of the Iroquois, declares that "the Indian regarded woman as the inferior, the dependent, and the servant of man, and, from nature and habit, she actually considered herself to be so." The two honorable employments among Indians were war and hunting, and these were reserved for the men. Other employments were considered degrading and were therefore gallantly reserved for the women.

[FOOTNOTE 31: Charlevoix, V. 397-424; Letourneau, 351. See also Mackenzie, _V. fr. M._, 84, 87; Smith, _Arauc._, 238; _Bur. Ethnol._, 1887, 468-70.]

 

WOMAN'S POLITICAL RULE

Comanche Indians, who treated their squaws with especial contempt, nevertheless would not hesitate on occasion to submit to the rule of a female chief (Bancroft, I., 509); and the same is true of other tribes in America, Africa, etc. (Grosse, 163). In this respect, barbarians do not differ from civilized races; queenship is a question of blood or family and tells us nothing whatever about the status of women in general. As regards the "equal rights" of the Dyak women just referred to, if they really have them, it is not as women, but as men, that is, in so far as they have become like men. This we see from what Schwaner says (I., 161) of the tribes in the Southeast:

"The women are allowed great privileges and liberties.
Not infrequently they rule at home and over whole
tribes with manly power, incite to war, and often
personally lead the men to battle."

Honors paid to such viragoes are honors to masculinity, not to femininity.

 

GREEK ESTIMATE OF WOMEN

Here again the transition from the barbarian to the Greek is easy and natural. The ancient Greek looked down on women as women. "One man," exclaims Iphigenia in Euripides, "is worth more than ten thousand women." There were, of course, certain virtues that were esteemed in women, but these, as Becker has said, differed but little from those required of an obedient slave. It is only in so far as women displayed masculine qualities that they were held worthy of higher honor. The heroines of Plutarch's essay on "The Virtues of Women" are women who are praised for patriotic, soldier-like qualities, and actions. Plato believed that men who were bad in this life would, on their next birth, be women. The elevation of women, he held, could be best accomplished by bringing them up to be like men. But this matter will be discussed more fully in the chapter on Greece, as will that of the _adulation_ which was paid to wanton women by Greek and Roman poets, and which has been often mistaken for _adoration_. George Eliot speaks of "that adoration which a young man gives to a woman whom he feels to be greater and better than himself." No Greek ever felt a woman to be "greater and better than himself," wherefore true adoration--the deification of persons--was out of the question. But there was no reason why a Greek or Roman should not have indulged in servile flattery and hypocritical praise for the selfish purpose of securing the carnal favors of a mercenarily coy courtesan. He was capable of adulation but not of adoration, for one cannot adore a slave, a drudge or a wanton. The author of the _Lover's Lexicon_ claims, indeed, that "love can and does exist without respect," but that is false. Infatuation of the senses may exist without respect, but refined, sentimental love is blighted by the discovery of impurity or vulgarity. Adoration is essential to true love, and adoration includes respect.

 

MAN-WORSHIP AND CHRISTIANITY

If we must, therefore, conclude that man in primitive and ancient times was unable to feel that love of which adoration is an essential ingredient, how is it with women? From the earliest times, have they not been taught, with club and otherwise, to look up to man as a superior being, and did not this enable them to adore him with true love? No, for primitive women, though they might fear or admire man for his superior power, were too coarse, obscene, ignorant, and degraded--being as a rule even lower than the men--to be able to share even a single ingredient of the refined love that we experience. At the same time it may be said (though it sounds sarcastic) that woman had a natural advantage over man in being gradually trained to an attitude of devotion. Just as the care of her infants taught her sympathy, so the daily inculcated duty of sacrificing herself for her lord and master fostered the germs of adoration. Consequently we find at more advanced stages of civilization, like those represented by India, Greece, and Japan, that whenever we come across a story whose spirit approaches the modern idea of love, the embodiment of that love is nearly always a woman. Woman had been taught to worship man while he still wallowed in the mire of masculine selfishness and despised her as an inferior. And to the present day, though it is not considered decorous for young women to reveal their feelings till after marriage or engagement, they adore their chosen ones:

For love's insinuating fire they fan
With sweet ideas of a god like man.

In this respect, as in so many others, woman has led civilization. Man, too, gradually learned to doff his selfishness, and to respect and adore women, but it took many centuries to accomplish the change, which was due largely to the influence of Christ's teachings. As long as the aggressive masculine virtues alone were respected, feminine gentleness and pity could not but be despised as virtues of a lower grade, if virtues at all. But as war became less and less the sole or chief occupation of the best men, the feminine virtues, and those who exercised them, claimed and received a larger share of respect.

Christianity emphasized and honored the feminine virtues of patience, meekness, humility, compassion, gentleness, and thus helped to place women on a level with man, and in the noblest of moral qualities even above him. Mariolatry, too, exerted a great influence. The worship of one immaculate woman gradually taught men to respect and adore other women, and as a matter of course, it was the lover who found it easiest to get down on his knees before the girl he worshipped. _

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